Modeling and Evaluating Relationships and Service Contracts in Public Transportation: A Pilot Project in Italy

Abstract

Local transportation services are an essential component of all modern urban infrastructures. The constantly growing requirements and expectations from several stakeholders, ranging from public authorities, service providers and customers, demand a deep rethinking of the entire system. Such services must be oriented towards sustainability and everyday living, thus needing significant Quality of Service (QoS) improvement in this sector. This paper aims at highlighting the main challenges for modeling and implementing the relationships between the stakeholders in the public transportation sector and proposes a systemic modeling approach that would serve to design, implement, and monitor a QoS-regulatory document. A taxonomy of quality indicators and service levels are proposed along with metrics on the basis of athe European and Italian regulatory background as well as of the public transportation service lifecycle model. The proposed approach has been validated by developing a service analytics system deployed at the regional transportation agency in the Apulia administrative region of Southern Italy.